* * * * * The Suffolk Miracle, or, A relation of a young man who a month after his death appeared to his sweetheart and carryed her behind him fourty miles in two hours time and was never seen after but in the grave. To the tune of My bleeding heart, etc. London: Printed for W. Thackery and T. Passenger. [1689. _The date added by Wood._] Roxburghe and Crawford: Printed by and for A. M[ilbourne], and sold by the booksellers of Pye-corner Pepys: Printed for F. C[oles], T. V[ere], J. W[right], J. C[lark], W. T[hackeray], T. P[assinger]. * * * * * =a.= 14^3, 25^1. handcherchief. 16^4. he set (O. B. left). 17^2. whose. 22^1. too. 24^4. others. 25^4. undoe. =b.= 3^1. There was a young man. 4^1. addresses. 4^3. But when. 16^4. he set. 19^1. did not you. 19^3. hair stand. 27^2. did _wanting_. FOOTNOTES: [51] Mr W. E. A. Axon, in his Lancashire Gleanings, p. 261, speaks of the story of the Spectre Bridegroom as having been current in the neighborhood of Liverpool in the last century, both in an oral and a printed form. But it is plain that what was current, either way, was simply ‘The Suffolk Miracle.’ Of this I have a copy learned in the north of Ireland in 1850 (and very much changed as to form), in which the scene is laid “between Armagh and County Clare.” [52] Popular Romances of the West of England, collected and edited by Robert Hunt, First Series, pp. 265-72, dating from about 1830. [53] A portion (or portions) of a Low German tale of this class, the verses and a little more, was the basis of Bürger’s ‘Lenore,’ composed in 1773. (As to the particulars of the traditional basis, Erich Schmidt seems to me undoubtedly right: Charakteristiken, p. 219 f.) At the end of the last century, when ‘Lenore’ became well known in England through half a dozen translations, it was maintained that Bürger had taken the idea of his ballad from ‘The Suffolk Miracle,’ with which he was supposed to have become acquainted through the copy in Old Ballads, 1723. See The Monthly Magazine, 1796, II, 603. But it is nearly certain that Bürger had not seen, and never saw, the “Old Ballads” of 1723. In 1777 Boie made him acquainted with a book of that title, but this was in all probability Evans’s first collection, which appeared in that year. See Strodtmann, Briefe von und an G. A. Bürger, II, 85, 87. Bürger knew ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ from Percy’s Reliques, and took a hint or two from that, besides the lover’s name.